A Social Capital View of a Writing Center- WAC Partnership
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Date
2010
Authors
Hall, R. Mark
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Michele Eodice, in her chapter, “Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration Is,” from The Writing Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship, has called upon writing centers to professionalize by developing collaborative relationships across campus in order to further our missions and those of the university, to “carry on deliberate, productive relationships about writing, in writing, for writing with our technology support staff, our librarians, our student services folks, our center for teaching facilitators, our first-year experience program designers, our faculty from anthropology to zoology” (129). Similar arguments have been made by other writing center scholars (Koster; Murphy; Wingate). This essay describes one Writing-Across-theCurriculum (WAC) affiliation fostered by California’s Central Valley State University (CVSU)[1] Writing Center. By examining an example of a successful WAC partnership, I hope to lead readers to new insights about developing their own writing center alliances. As Peter Carino points out in “Reading Our Own Words: Rhetorical Analysis and the Institutional Discourse of Writing Centers,” from Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation, we must strike a delicate balance. We must make ourselves integral, indeed essential, to the educational aims of the institution, while at the same time resisting either marginality or servitude. He argues that “directors must inform without
confusing, must educate without condescending, must promise without bluffing, must assert without offending, and must offer help without promising servility” (92). In short, we need to take a strategic approach to building a dynamic system of supportive associations.